As noted here the other day, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson addressed graduating cadets in mid-May at Virginia Military Institute. He didn’t mention the name of the president who dismissed him after 13 months as Secretary of State — or even the presidency.

Yet readers of reports from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and a pair of syndicated columnists may be forgiven for thinking the VMI commencement speaker had one mission in his talk: to verbally attack President Trump.

* New York Times headline and first paragraph: “In Rebuke of Trump, Tillerson Says Lies Are a Threat to Democracy.”  “In a veiled rebuke of President Trump, former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson warned on Wednesday that American democracy was threatened by a growing ‘crisis of ethics and integrity.’”

* From Washington Post’s first two paragraphs:  Tillerson “warned . . . that deceptive leaders and ‘alternative realities’ are a threat to democracy, an implicit critique of his former boss, President Trump…. He never mentioned Trump by name, but his meaning was clear.”

* Huffington Post headline and subhead: “Rex Tillerson Warns Grads of Living in ‘Alternative Realities’: Gee, wonder who he’s talking about.”

* Syndicated columnists Cokie and Steve Roberts: At VMI, “only after he was fired did Tillerson have the guts to say publicly what he really thought about a president who has no regard for facts. … [he] thus joined a small band of Republicans who have shaken free from suffocating influence to publicly state their true feelings about the president.”

The complete reports are all online.

The Robertses reported that Tillerson “thundered” the following (which he did in fact say):  “If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”

An unsigned online report by The Atlantic (which was accompanied by the  PBS NewsHour video of the full address) noted that Tillerson “emphasized the importance of truth” in the address, and it commented that “many interpreted [the speech] as a rebuke to President Trump.” But the Atlantic coverage was refreshingly nuanced. In addition to the passage just above (which the HuffPost also cited), it quoted these parts:

“An essential tenet of a free society, a free people, is access to the truth. A government structure and a societal understanding that freedom to seek the truth is the very essence of freedom itself. ‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ It is only by fierce defense of the truth and a common set of facts that we create the conditions for a democratic, free society, comprised of richly diverse peoples, that those free peoples can explore and find solutions to the very challenges confronting the complex society of free people.

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom. This is the life of nondemocratic societies, comprised of people who are not free to seek the truth. . . .

“A responsibility of every American citizen to each other is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what the truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not, and begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness, and demand our pursuit of America’s future be fact-based, not based on wishful thinking; not hopeful outcomes made in shallow promises; but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges. It is also that foundational commitment to truth and facts that binds us to other like-minded democratic nations, that we Americans will always deal with them from the same set of truths and facts. And it is truth that says to our adversaries, we say what we mean, and we mean what we say.

“When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth, even on what may seem the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America. If we do not as Americans confront the crisis of ethics and integrity in our society, and among our leaders in both the public and private sector, and regrettably at times even the nonprofit sector, then American democracy as we know it is entering its twilight years.”

Tillerson, who studied engineering as an undergraduate, shared with the graduates that “as a civil engineer” he appreciates the dictionary definition of “integrity” as “the state of being complete and whole.” He continued: “The structural integrity of this building … we know it has a complete and whole integrity, so we can feel comfortable sitting beneath these beams and this roof that it’s not going to end up down around our feet as we sit here.”

Considering how this graphic image can apply to the collapse of the World Trade Center skyscrapers nearly 17 years ago, it may not be entirely delusional to think Tillerson may be encouraging Americans to confront a crisis of ethics and integrity among news-media executives who have kept their reporters from exposing the falsehoods and impossibilities of the government’s accounts of the crimes of September 11, 2001.

Not everything said in greater D.C. is about how bad or dangerous a president Trump is, no matter what inside-the-beltway lifers say. Some coverage of the Tillerson speech may reveal a greater blindness among media scribes and talking heads that is dangerous to the Republic, including avoidance of taking on ugly truths about 9/11.

This nation needs peace and healing, but it will not come with a press determined to avoid reality and bury truth.

— Mark